IBM's Systems and Technology Group (STG) is presenting an analyst forum up in lovely Ryebrook, NY. Yesterday afternoon's agenda offered several "deep dive" sessions with IBM's Distinguished Engineers, CTOs and other very knowledgeable staff.
Analytics | Storage | Virtualization & Cloud |
Cindy Grossman |
Brena Dietrich Vincent Hsu
Clod Barrera Amit Dave
Ian Robinson
Frank de Gilio
Although the operating systems and hardware architectures are different, IBM has been working to develop the same layers of management to allow IT administrators to use the same tools to manage all three systems.
IBM has been working to extend the capabilities of the IBM Power Systems both by adding new features to the Power architecture microprocessors and the virtual machine software and operating system virtualization and partitioning software these systems support. Over the last 10 years, the company has offered amazing levels of both granularity (it is possible to assign as little as one hundredth of a processor to a VM) and scalability (it is possible to assign up to 256 processors to a VM).
IBM's management tools for IBM System X now support VMware, KVM, Xen (supported by the Tivoli management framework) and others.
The overall goal was moving past virtualization for its own sake to making it a tool to allow organizations the ability to look at all of the resources of all of the systems in the data center as a pool of resources that can be used as needed.
In his view, it is time for organizations to refocus on their business needs, the problems they face and then select the appropriate tools. It is his view that the rigid, stove-piped IT departments inside of many large companies are near the end of their useful lives and it is now time to think about where and how a cross-company organization needs to be created to deal with today's issues.
We're moving well beyond the time that workloads are placed on a single, physical system and execute there for the rest of the lifecycle of that workload. He pointed out that mainframe and midrange (IBM Power System) workloads are nearly all exectuing in a virtual environment today. X86 workloads are rapidly moving in that direction.
What was clear to me is that IBM has a very good, very pragmatic view of both its customers' requirements and available IT approaches and technology. Both the sessions and the meetings I had with each of the individual presenters demonstrated that IBM knows what is happening and has concrete plans to help customers make the most of today's technology.
I believe one of IBM's bigger challenges is finding a simple, clear and persuasive way to discuss its huge portfolio of products and services. Frank de Gilio had a wonderful conversation about the wisdom of starting with a small concept that would immediately help a customer and show a positive return on investment and then move on from there. Showing a comprehensive, complete slide of everything IBM is doing on any topic would scare decision makers and make IBM's products appear difficult and complex.